Ivo Budil at yesterday’s conference on migration:
What we call “civilizational decline” is, in truth, a product of a poorly designed socio-economic system. It is not an inevitable stage in the life cycle of civilizations, nor the result of some mysterious aging or metaphysical moral exhaustion. Such explanations sound grand, but those who preach them rarely offer a concrete description of what this supposed “decay” consists of. Instead, we get long lists of symptoms — not causes.
Budil argues that the remedy lies in restoring productive capacity: building a society grounded in the creation and cultivation of real, tangible goods. In other words, abandoning an order in which success is tied to rent-seeking, speculation, and the manufacture of impressions rather than the making of things. As a much-quoted young mathematician noted, industry will eventually force the change itself.
This, in a nutshell, is the crisis of Western civilization — and the path out of it.